The Supreme Court is set to release decisions in two cases about same-sex marriage. While hearings in March on California's ban on gay marriage were murky, hearings on the Defense of Marriage Act were more clear, as the justices seemed ready to strike down a central part of the act that bans federal benefits to gay spouses.

The court will decide whether Proposition 8, a California voter initiative that defined marriage as a union between a man and a woman, violates the federal Constitution.

The court will also decide whether a part of the federal Defense of Marriage Act of 1996 that defines marriage to be "only a legal union between one man and one woman as husband and wife" in determining federal benefits violates the Constitution's equal protection clause.

I think it is a good sign to see my 9Marks friends talking about being practical. I'm very thankful for their emphasis on ecclesiology and many other factors, but I'm also concerned that the anti-practical ideas that can come out of such movements are unhelpful. I get it—and Mark Dever tells me all the time—there are lots of practical books and they are trying to pull the other way. But, they are now big enough and have been around long enough that there is another danger—a whole group of pastors with no practical-mindedness who have convinced themselves that the practical does not need to be considered—and even studied. This article will help.

As Bible-believing Christians, we insist that everything we do be based on the Bible. And yet I'll bet that of the decisions you made today, 99 percent of them were not direct applications of Scripture, but were pragmatic in nature. What color should you paint the church? Should you have lunch with Joe or with Tim? What words will best serve your wife when you walk through the door?

Does that make us hypocrites? No: one of the greatest gifts each of us has received from our creator—and for which we will one day give account—is our minds. "Pragmatism" can refer to an anti-supernatural philosophy, but it can also be just another word for "wise judgment," which is commended in Scripture in the strongest terms. And with poor judgment, it is quite possible to root what we do in the Scriptures and still fail to serve God well.

If we decide that to be biblical means we must never be pragmatic, we are essentially rejecting the role of wisdom in the Christian life. And that's just not how God has ordained things to be. He has given in his Word everything we need for faith and practice. But working these things out will often require a good deal of sanctified judgment. Or, to use that other word, a good deal of biblical pragmatism.

So how can we steward our pragmatism well? I think in two ways: (1) when we are pragmatic, we should ensure our pragmatism is biblical; and (2) we rightly discern when the Bible expects us to use wise judgment, and when we are commanded to simply trust and obey.

Pragmatism is not a problem until it begins to replace instructions that God has already given us. As a friend of mine puts it, we often approach decisions like we approach an empty whiteboard, entirely dependent on our good judgment to chart a path forward. But if we know our Bibles we know that there is already writing on that whiteboard, especially when it comes to leading a local church. God has given us guidance both about whatwe should do and how we should do it.

In ten years of teaching, writing, and researching theology, I've never once been asked whether or not I believe in inerrancy. As it happens, I do. If someone was to ask me whether, in my view, the Scriptures contain mistakes or not, I would answer in the negative. Partly this is a result of theological conviction about the divine and human components of Scripture: that when God's words are expressed by humans, neither their human aspects (authorial personality, tone, language, mode of expression) nor their divine aspects (truthfulness, authority, clarity, reliability) are compromised. Partly it's because I'd find it strange to tell people that the whole Bible represents the word of God, and the word of God is completely truthful, but that parts of the Bible aren't completely truthful. (I don't mean to say that nobody can believe all three of these things but that it would be beyond my intellectual faculties to do so.) Mostly, though, it's because of Jesus. Put simply, based on what I read in the Gospels, I cannot imagine (if we let this rather implausible thought-experiment run for a moment) Jesus being asked whether the Scriptures contained mistakes or not, and saying yes.

Having said that, I cannot imagine him being asked the question in the first place. From what we can tell, the question of inerrancy was not a live debate in first-century Palestine; nobody had bothered to distinguish between inerrancy and infallibility, caveats about the original manuscripts were infrequent, and you didn't have to affirm inerrancy to belong to the Galilean Theological Society. In fact, most of Jesus's famous statements about the truthfulness and permanence of the Jewish scriptures—"not one iota will disappear from the Law until all is accomplished," "the scriptures cannot be broken," "it is written," "the scriptures must be fulfilled," "David, speaking by the Spirit," and so on—give the impression of having been largely uncontroversial to their original audiences. If there were parts of the Hebrew Bible that Jesus, or anyone else we encounter in the Gospels, regarded as mistaken (which, from what we know of first-century Judaism, would be a highly unusual view), they have left no such indication in the records we have. The idea of there being mistakes in the Torah, for example, would not have occurred to him, or to any of his earliest followers.

Not only that, but many of the biblical passages people today find the most troubling, and the most likely to be "mistaken," are also affirmed willy-nilly by Jesus and the apostles, with complete disregard for any subsequent historical-critical brouhahas that might emerge. Creation ex nihilo, the origin of death in humans, the murder of Abel by Cain, a cataclysmic flood of judgment, the righteous judgment of Sodom and Gomorrah, the Mosaic origin of the Torah, manna from heaven, driving out the Canaanites, the Isaianic authorship of the servant songs, and so on—it's almost as if Jesus and his followers went out of their way to affirm and validate all of the most awkward and recalcitrant apologetic curveballs in the Tanakh, just to make life difficult for post-Enlightenment Western interpreters. It is possible, of course, that Jesus and the apostles were also mistaken, and that their affirmation of all these challenging Old Testament texts reflects nothing more than their limited horizons of understanding. (Most Christians are not prepared to go there, of course, and neither am I; those who do, though in my view misguided, are at least consistent.) But it is hard to argue for an errant Bible based on the words and actions of an inerrant Jesus.